6 Badass Tricks You Can Do With Fire (That Might Kill You)

Fire is awesome. And dangerous. Fortunately for us, people who enjoy toeing the line of complete self immolation for the sake of a brief spectacle continue to find creative ways to satisfy their urges, and to post them on YouTube.

We're comfortable showing you these without fear that you'll accidentally torch yourself and everyone you love because one, they're fairly complicated to pull off and involve stuff you probably don't have lying around the house; and two, we have faith our readers are not morons.

Still, we're leaving this warning for when you come back and read this while feeling drunk and adventurous: Don't do any of these yourself, ever.

Why waste bacon by stuffing it into a cheeseburger or feeding the homeless when you could be using it to cut through steel?

Using a metal rod, roll seven tubes of the Italian super-bacon, known as prosciutto, and bake it overnight on low heat (we really can't recommend leaving the oven on all night unattended, but by this point if cooking some bacon is what blows your house up, it was probably your time to go).

Next, wrap the hardened bacon in more bacon, continually resisting the urge to dip it in a jar of mayonnaise and shove it into your mouth, and continue baking it. Eventually, you get this:

Tie a little more uncooked prosciutto around this beast, then duct tape it to a metal nozzle, hook it up to a tank of oxygen, turn on the O2 and light that motherfucker up.

IT'S BACOOOOOON!

The flames can melt steel, but the bacon itself amazingly doesn't burn. You can take it off and crumble it up in a salad if you want. The food is unscathed because it turns out the random mess that is organic life makes for poor heat conduction. This is why logs don't burn evenly, and your old aunt's wooden reading chair was relatively unscathed when she spontaneously combusted. You can accomplish the same thing using a cucumber and seven bread sticks, if for some reason you find yourself trapped in an Olive Garden.

This trick combines all the fun of a welding torch with the thrill of blowing both of your hands off with a ball of ignited hydrogen gas.

This is about as simple as it gets: They took a rubber balloon, filled it with Hydrogen gas, put a valve on the end of it and ignited the escaping gas. To what end or purpose is not discussed in the video, nor is it explicitly stated whether you have to be listening to shitty music to maximize your output--but hey, you've got a flame jet.

The valve prevents the flame from just igniting the balloon (the escaping fuel moves out and away from the balloon, ensuring that the flame continues to burn in an opposite direction--as long as the valve is open and there is gas left inside).

Sure, it may seem totally pointless, but add a rigid skeletal structure to a large enough balloon and suddenly you've got a vehicle powered by a cheap, clean-burning fuel and so long, energy crisis. No historical precedence exists to suggest this video made by a simple man doing something stunningly reckless for no conceivable reason can't go on to revolutionize the modern world.

Well, besides this.

These guys figured they'd use a little chemistry to get around all those pesky laws that ban the sale of fireworks in some states (why do those exist, anyway?)

They just took a length of PVC pipe, filled it with sugar and potassium nitrate and dropped a match inside. It ignites, starts smoking and shooting off sparks like a Korean Transformer, and voila, you've got a roman candle.

So apparently the Romans were pretty relieved when flashlights came along, because it seems unlikely one of these would light a dark hallway without also setting everything in sight ablaze. Keen eyes may notice that partway through the video, the sparks land in the open bucket of highly flammable potassium nitrate/sugar mixture, which for some reason was being kept close by. In certain situations, this can be dangerous.

This is one of those situations.

More hijinks ensue when the base of the PVC pipe begins to flame, because plastics are petroleum products, and last we checked, oil burns. Maybe using a a metal pipe would result in a less stupid device that should easily withstand the high temperatures, but if you're making home-made fireworks in your backyard at all you probably can't be bothered to worry about that sort of thing.